Never Is a Promise
by siobhane
Summary: There is only one thing Seifer truly regrets: what he will never get the chance to tell her. [Phoenix Rising]


Six months and twenty-two days after the end of the war, he sees her in Deling City, tall and lean and gorgeous and there's a glow about her he knows he will never be able to touch. Her hair is down and it falls in soft honey waves to her waist, and Seifer imagines what it would be like to run his fingers through it, how good it would feel to crush his mouth against hers and make her beg him for more.

It's an adolescent fantasy he never quite let go of, one he will never see come true in this lifetime or the next. He aimed too high, and fell too hard, and all he has left is a bruised soul and a heart that won't quit beating, no matter hard he tries to extinguish his own light.

He follows for a few blocks, his hands crammed deep into the pockets of a navy blue peacoat. Even from a distance, he's mesmerized by the sway of her hips, her unconscious way of bleeding sensuality in her wake. He thinks about what it would be like to hold those hips in his hands, to dig in and take root and find a home within her soul.

She would never have him. Not this hollowed out husk that no longer believes in anything real.

As if she senses him, she stops and turns to look behind her and the light catches tourmaline blue eyes, a color so pure he will never forget the exact shade or how they look in a blaze of sunlight. He turns around and walks the other way as she searches the faces behind her.

Maybe she catches a glimpse. Maybe she doesn't.

* * *

He finds his tattered, stained old trench coat in a box in a closet a year later and wonders why he kept it. There's no longer any sentimental value in it, only a reminder of how far he's fallen. That evening, on a cliff somewhere south of Dollet, he sets it on fire in a fit of rage and drinks a pint of Gyshal whiskey while he watches it burn to ash. If he had his way, he would burn with it, but fire can't touch him.

He burns all of Fujin's letters and watches the ash, still ablaze, scatter to the wind. She forgives him but he doesn't want to be forgiven. He wants to forget and until he can, there is no moving forward. From this height, world is too big, and there is nowhere he belongs anymore.

At Fujin's urging, he composes letters he never sends, pages and pages full of scratched out words and smudged ink, and trite, tired entreaties, and apologies he doesn't mean. They read like the lies they are and he crumples each one and throws it away.

Eventually, he runs out of paper and words, and there are too many things he can't bring himself to say.

He should never have to apologize for what he was fated to do.

But if that was his fate, his entire purpose for being, what is his purpose now?

* * *

 _My Dear Instructor,_

 _I bet that made you cringe, huh? I hope so, for old time's sake. I could say a bunch of stupid things here and tell you all about how great life is, but I won't waste your time or mine and I don't feel like lying. What I have to say is best said to your face anyway, so if you're ever in Timber, look me up._

 _Almasy_

* * *

She's in civilian clothing when she steps off the train, in jeans and a gray sweater that looks too soft for his work-roughed hands to touch. His insides quiver as she smiles, a real smile, and lifts her hand as if she wants to make sure he sees her.

As if he could miss her. She's the brightest thing around and her honey hair is like a beacon in absolute darkness. No one can hold a candle to her light.

They wind up at a bar and there are long pauses in the conversation Seifer is unable to fill with words that mean anything. This must be how it feels to be Squall, unable to articulate the things he needs most to say. He gets too drunk and Quistis takes him to his tiny apartment across the square and puts him to bed.

"Was there ever a chance for us, Quistis?" he slurs as he settles into the lumpy mattress.

"Never," she says and it sounds like an oath.

But Seifer is good at reading people, and he knows all her tells. That split second of hesitation before she speaks, that flicker of doubt, the way she clasps her elbow and turns her face away.

It's a lie.

There was a chance, and he's blown it again.

She is gone when he wakes in the morning.

* * *

Six years, two months and thirty-seven days since the war, and he sees her face on his TV screen, still tall and lean and gorgeous and she still has that glow he will never touch.

It was a fire that took her, the very thing that Seifer can't escape, an inferno in some warehouse in Deling City unrelated to her mission. He thinks of her dying that way and it guts him. If she wanted to burn he could have helped her in better and different ways, for surely his touch would have left behind scorch marks on her skin, but ever the SeeD, duty came before what she needed most.

He doesn't go to the funeral but visits her grave a few months later and finds an assortment of offerings left against the stark white marble of her headstone. Wilted and dead flowers, a medal of some sort, a doll with honey-gold hair, and a brass belt buckle left behind by some heartsick Trepie. He clears them away and the flowers disintegrate in his hands, the petals fall away on the breeze and he thinks of setting them on fire to speed their return to the earth. Instead, he casts them aside and drags his fingers over her name etched in marble.

There's no point in saying the words now. If her consciousness still exists somewhere, maybe she knows why he never pulled his punches and why he could never say it out loud.

She said all along, it would be a cold day in hell, the second Tuesday after never, and now there is nothing and no one he regrets more.

She is gone, and she's kept her promise.

* * *

Notes: Improv, inspired by Fiona Apple's "Never Is a Promise."


End file.
